ePublishing Resources

for Schools: Blogs,

Podcasts, eBooks, Wikis,
and More  
Internet@Schools East 2010

Rita H. Oates, Ph.D.

Vice President, Education, ePals,
Inc.
roates@corp.epals.com
Internet@Schools
East 2010
Arlington, VA
April 13, 2010
 Description
 Social networking sites and Web 2.0 are changing the online
world, and it’s time for schools to fully use these epublishing
tools. Teachers want to use electronic resources and seek to
learn how to assess and best use them.
 Presenter Rita Oates, involved with creating electronic texts and
online learning materials for more than 20 years, will show how
basic principles of teaching, learning, and instructional design
are applied to the newest media formats. You’ll see how to judge
the educational effectiveness of electronic resources and some
best-case examples of digital learning materials from
educational, government, association, and for-profit sources.
Features that help engage students and promote more robust
student learning will be emphasized. The focus is on the
opportunity for project-based learning, issues of classroom use,
and optimal interactive learning materials.
 Basic principles
 For whom is the content being
developed?
 What should the learner be able to do
after interacting with the content?
 What methods, activities and resources
should you use?
 How will you know if you were
successful? Or that learning occurred?
Middle school for girls,
Miami
 Learner characteristics
 Academic background: previous academic
experience or exposure to the topic
 Personal or social characteristics: Age,
attitude, work experience, how the content
relates to one’s life.
 Characteristics of the non-conventional
learner: Culturally diverse learners, primary
language, learners with disabilities.
 Learning styles, the existing conditions
necessary for an individual to learn.
 Motivation of the learner: the student
seeking grades, credit, self-improvement,
salary or status advancement.
 Critical Success Factor
 Teacher attitude
 Single biggest predictor of
student learning in
multiple studies of
technology-enhanced
education
 Teachers who believe their
students will learn by using
something --have students
who do learn more than
other teachers using the
same materials
 Steps in the Instructional
Design Process
 Assess the situation:
 Normative needs (test scores, grades, prerequisites)
 Comparative needs (learning styles)
 Expressed needs (feedback of students and other peers)
 Performance Assessment (Feedback from previous students regarding
previous instruction. Answers the question: Are the goals of teaching being
met?) Choose a design model to follow or design your own using established
instructional principles.
 State the Goal: Think about why you are having students write
papers, discuss certain topics; reason why you are assigning certain
topics and tasks. Articulate this in some way to your students.
 Select Appropriate Delivery Medium: Is multimedia appropriate?
Why use this medium? How will it help enhance your efforts to meet
your learning objectives?
 Implementation: What help/support do I need? Do learners need?
 Evaluation and Revision

 ADDIE model: analysis, design, development,

implementation and evaluation
New Tools, New
Opportunities

Student engagement
Collaboration
Multiple tools
 Web 0.0-> Web 1.0->
Web 2.0
 Web 0.0: search for information in a
printed book
 Web 1.0: search for information
online
 Web 2.0: create and contribute
information, collaborate and interact
 Sometimes….things are
mixed!
 60th Anniversary of Declaration
of Human Rights
 Student viewpoints shared on
ePals…web 2.0
 National Geographic published
selected student entries
in book by
with some photos:
web 0.0
 Platform to engage
students
 http://heinle.epals.com
 Users of ELL textbook can practice
English with worldwide community of
learners through project-based
learning

Similar community: International

Baccalaureate (Coming in July 2010)
 User-created, digital
content
 Blogs
 Podcasts
 eBooks or e-books
 Wikis

 And what else?

 Self-publishing on the web
 New forms to combine all of the above
 Scholarly research on
ePublishing
 Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB) is
available at:
http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html
 Published by the University of Houston Libraries from 1996
to 2006 by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
 Presented selected English-language articles, books and
other printed and electronic sources useful in
understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts
on the Internet.
 Most sources published between 1990 and 2006 plus a few
key sources published before 1990. Where possible, links
were provided to sources that were freely available on the
Internet. An archive of versions 1 to 64 of SEPB is available
at: http://epress.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
 Children’s Literature
 Exposure to ebooks
 Online Children’s Classics
 Internet Public Library
 Shareware eBooks.com
 Read aloud using great picture books from
many lands
 International Children's Digital Library
 Multicultural literature holdings
 Creation of an original children’s book,
with option to create an ebook
 DeskTop
Author - eBook Software, Brochure Software
 Language Arts
 Literature Circles
 Access to classics and award-winning
books and less expensive new books
 Internet Public Library
 Shareware eBooks.com
 World Wide School Library
 Dramas and scripts
 Audio Books
 www.audible.com
 mp3 books
 E-book Favorites
 Mighty Books
 Stories Written by Kids
 Story Place
 Tumblebooks (English, Spanish,
French)
 Raz Kids
 Hear the book
 Read it and record own voice
 Online stories
 Children's stories by category
 Children's Storybooks Online -
Stories for Kids of All Ages
 ESL Resources eBooks
 Hans Christian Andersen Fairy
Tales and Stories
 Ebook on YouTube presentation
 Books and student-
produced video
 Info on books and authors, book reports:
 SchoolTube
 TeacherTube

 Can be linked to your school website

 Retelling classic tales, make up own stories

 Post work on www.epals.com
 View work from around world
Book Reports in New
Formats
 Graduate Courses
 E texts vs. print textbooks
 Less expensive or free
 Computer based
 Greater flexibility re: curriculum development
 Students still tend to print out the e texts,
put them in a notebook, and bring them to
class
 Challenge when “page numbers” differ
depending on printing method (HTML, from
Word, etc.)
 Resources: Devices to
read on
 Microsoft Reader
 Sony Reader
 Amazon’s Kindle
 iTouch
 Cell phones??
 More to come
 Resources
 Online Copyright Handbook
 E-article on E books and young people
 Digital Book 2008
 Presentations at E books in Education Confere
 Using Electronic Texts as the Course Textbook
 Literature Circles Through Technology
by Terence Cavanaugh
 The Digital Reader: Using E books in
K-12 Education by Terence
Cavanaugh
 www.iste.org to purchase
 The Changing Face of
the Web
The net is no longer just about static websites,
instead it’s about…
 The art and science of mass collaboration
 Prosumers: consumers as producers

“This new generation of prosumers treats the world as a place for creation
learning and interacting means they will treat the world as a stage for
their own innovations…static, immoveable, non editable items will be
anathema, ripe for the dustbins of 20th century history.”
Wikinomics:
How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
by Don Tapscott
 The Changing Face of
the Web
How is social networking and Web 2.0 being used in
classrooms?
ePals Global Community http://www.epals.com
Classroom 2.0 http://www.classroom20.com/
Using Wikis in Education
http://www.wikiineducation.com/display/ikiw/Home
Blogs in Education http://awd.cl.uh.edu/blog/
 What are Wikis?
 Wikis in Plain English
 Free wikis for educational use:
 www.pbwiki.com
 www.wetpaint.com

 www.wikispaces.com

Best known wiki: Wikipedia

How can we use Wikis in education?
 http://scstevenson.wikispaces.com/
 Blogs and Wikis
Blogs Wikis
• More like • Social • More like
journaling or a meeting
Network
a news paper • Share place
• Can leave information • Can
comments • Make collaborate
comments to write
• Polling • Link with together on
• Calendar others, send same
email document
• Forums
• Discuss
the page
 Blogs
Blogs in Plain English
 Top 100 Education Blogs
http://oedb.org/library/features/top-100-educatio
 Blogs in Education http://awd.cl.uh.edu/blog/
 People who blog about education:
http://supportblogging.com/Links+to+School+Bl
 Blogs as authentic education:
http://web20intheclassroom.blogspot.com/2008/

 How can you use Blogs in your

classroom?
ePals Award-winning blog
tool is free

www.epals.com
 Blog issues in education
 Safe for students
 Secure from hackers and disruption
 “Walled garden”
 Who can view? Who can comment?
 Permissions levels allow teacher flexibility
 Sufficient storage and filesharing capability
 Dallas ISD implementing ePals blogs as first
one safe for educational use in their district
 Widgets
 Small code to paste onto website and more
 Ask ePals at www.epals.com as example of
educational questions being answered worldwide
 Users ask questions, volunteer answers
 Other users rate answers
 People who answer questions are rated and ranked

 Underlying technology from Ask Yedda

 Podcasts
 Lit2Go from UCF; #1 at iTunes
University
 Foreign language practice
 Music and music history
 Drama (learn parts)
 Teacher training
 Listen to books, articles, news
 And….?
Audio books to download
 Librivox
 Goal: to make all public domain books
available as free audiobooks. (texts from
Project Gutenburg)
 Titles available: 100 books and 200+
shorter works, including poems, short
stories, speeches
 Founded in 2005; volunteer readers
 www.librivox.org
Audio books to download
 Literalsystems
 ''We endeavor to create a great listening
experience for our audience free of
charge, and with no commercial
advertising.''
 Titles available: 23 novels and short
stories, 19 poems, 9 nonfiction works;
founded 2003.
 www.literalsystems.org
Audio books to download
 The Spoken Alexandria Project
 ''To build an audiobook equivalent of
Project Gutenberg one text at a time.''
 Titles available: 5 novels, 15 nonfiction
works and 1 poem; founded 2004.
 www.spokenalex.org

 More recordings are available for 25

cents to $8 at a sister site:
www.telltaleweekly.org
 ePublishing and
Collaborating
 Social networking
 Self-publishing on the web
 Online photo sharing
 Social bookmarking
 New forms combining “all of the above”
 Social Networking:
Education
Social Networks in Plain English
 ePals offers social networking among K12
teachers and classrooms; 16 million users in 200
countries and territories. Safe and protected
community.
 Classroom 2.0 Ning
 English Companion Ning
 LinkedIn professional connections, resume, job
search

How can we use social networking in our

classrooms? For teachers, for
students?
 Self-publishing on the
web
 Twitter
 Video publishing
 YouTube
 TeacherTube

 SchoolTube

 EduVision and eSchoolNews

 Scribd.com
 Online Photo Sharing
 Online Photo Sharing in Plain English.
 Flickr
 Webshots
 Photobucket
 Social Bookmarking
 Social Bookmarking in Plain English
 Del.icio.us
 Webshots
 Photobucket
 New forms combining “all
of the above” in one
location
 Content/Course management
systems (CMS)
 Learning management systems
(LMS)
 ePals LearningSpace, virtual
workspace designed for K12
 What are you doing with
ePublishing?
Audience invited to share ideas and
thoughts!
 Further information

 Dr. Rita Oates, ritaoates@aol.com

 roates@corp.epals.com
 Twitter: @ritaoates
 Additional information and examples
posted at:
 www.scribd.com